NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information)

Investigators

Abstract

Databases and Software NCBI assumed responsibility for the GenBank DNA sequence database in October 1992. NCBI staff with advanced training in molecular biology build the database from sequences submitted by individual laboratories and by data exchange with the international nucleotide sequence databases, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the DNA Database of Japan (DDBJ). Arrangements with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office enable the incorporation of patented sequence data. In addition to GenBank, NCBI supports and distributes a variety of databases for the medical and scientific communities. These include the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), the Molecular Modeling Database (MMDB) of 3D protein structures, the Unique Human Gene Sequence Collection (UniGene), a Gene Map of the Human Genome, the Taxonomy Browser, and the Cancer Genome Anatomy Project (CGAP), in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute. Entrez is NCBI's search and retrieval system that provides users with integrated access to sequence, mapping, taxonomy, and structural data. Entrez also provides graphical views of sequences and chromosome maps. A powerful and unique feature of Entrez is the ability to retrieve related sequences, structures, and references. The journal literature is available through PubMed, a Web search interface that provides access to over 11 million journal citations in MEDLINE and contains links to full-text articles at participating publishers' Web sites. BLAST is a program for sequence similarity searching developed at NCBI and is instrumental in identifying genes and genetic features. BLAST can execute sequence searches against the entire DNA database in less than 15 seconds. Additional software tools provided by NCBI include: Open Reading Frame Finder (ORF Finder), Electronic PCR, and the sequence submission tools, Sequin and BankIt. All of NCBI's databases and software tools are available from the WWW or by FTP. NCBI also has email servers that provide an alternative way to access the databases for text searching or sequence similarity searching.